Sada & Mada: Pentagram's Doha Design District IDs
Pentagram’s Mada and Sada use mirrored Arabic letterforms to make two distinct spaces feel like a single, locally rooted brand for Doha Design District.
Pentagram, led by Samar Maakaroun, has created two identities—Mada and Sada—to brand a maker’s space and an events venue inside Doha Design District, and the result matters because it treats sub-branding as architecture, not decoration.
What they did
Director Dana Kazic asked for two distinct spaces that would still feel part of the parent district. Instead of the usual shortcut—same typeface, same colour, loosely connected—the team developed names and letterforms that are literally reflections of each other. "The relationship had to allow equity to move in all directions: from DDD to the sub-brands, between the sub-brands themselves, between languages, and back again into the wider district," Samar Maakaroun and her team say.
How the design works
The maker space becomes Mada (meaning range, reach or possibility); the events space is Sada (meaning echo). Visually, the two wordmarks are built from nearly identical Arabic letterforms, mirrored and rearranged so one reads like the echo of the other. That mirrored logic makes the connection immediate: you don’t need a guideline PDF to explain the relationship, you feel it at a glance.
Both names also reuse the letter D lifted from the existing Doha Design District symbol, and other letterform details draw on the local architecture of Msheireb Downtown Doha. Those architectural echoes anchor the marks in place—they read as grown from the district rather than dropped in.
Why designers should care
This is a tidy lesson in brand architecture: strong sub-brands come from shared DNA, not cosmetic matching. By mining language, history and local structure, Pentagram made two separate identities that strengthen the parent brand while keeping distinct roles—Mada for making and experiment, Sada for presenting and amplifying work.
For any creative director wrestling with multiple names under one roof, the takeaway is simple: find the connective tissue and design from there. When it’s done right, the relationship is obvious—no explanation required.
Something wrong on this page? Tell us and we will fix it.
